ASK DR. SCHUND
(C)1992 Alan M. Schwartz
Dr. Schund, what caused the devastating Yellowstone National Park
conflagration?
The Space Defense Initiative was aptly christened "Star Wars" by
those who recognized willing suspension of disbelief when set up
by fast talking Federal pitchmen and the illusory fabrications of
special effects. The two major agonies of SDI were, A)what sort
of Buck Rogers symbolism would be so preposterous as to be
believable, and B)where to do the testing so that ultra-top
secret research could be leaked to Americans and Russians without
the doyens of wastrel spending appearing to be streetwalkers on
payday. Everybody agreed. Even a public that elected Jimmy
Carter president was smart enough to conceptualize guns.
The traditional handgun, rifle, cannon, or 40 inch naval whizbang
belching shells the weight of Volkswagens suffers from nuisances
imposed by the limitations of the nature of physical reality.
Star Wars had DoD funding, and was therefore immune from physical
reality. The lump that issues from a gun muzzle is propelled by
expanding gas. Past Mach 2 or 3, engineers cannot get much more
impulse from hot gas to further accelerate the slug, and air in
the gun barrel ahead of it cannot push aside fast enough to allow
its passage. The idea of multiple explosive chambers branched
along the gun barrel to sequentially fire as the projectile
passes is a nightmare of synchronicity and slow reloading.
When chemistry comes up short (2000 pound blockbusters) we resort
to physics (thermonuclear warheads), hence the electric railgun -
lineal descendent of some strikingly original cogitation by one
Tom Swift. Imagine a half inch cube of plastic with a gold
plated backside snugly fitting within a square tunnel extending
perhaps ten feet. The tunnel's top and bottom are electrical
insulators. The two sides are copper rails connected through low
inductance cabling to a capacitor bank the size of a defense
contractor's budget and storing a few megajoules of energy (in
the miniature prototype). The tunnel is capped with a thin
membrane and evacuated to a high vacuum. The cube sits against a
big Mil-spec spring in the breech. The rails are locked into the
capacitor bank, and a visiting school kid from Ashtabula, Ohio
plucks the magic twanger.
When the gold shorts the rails a gigawatt electrical current
flows, flashing metal into a sheet of plasma - a much better
conductor. A massive magnetic field inflates at right angles to
the current flow, and force is exerted at right angles to both.
The plastic cube goes zipping down the tunnel with the fires of
hell nipping at its butt, to emerge traveling at a stately three
to five miles per second, Mach 25. Something clever is stationed
downwind for the cube to hit, to amuse the scientists whose
blather validates the testing. A janitor then hits the switch
which begins the two hour capacitor bank recharge cycle.
No bullet is shaped like a sugar cube. The top secret, Lotus
Eater-classified heart of the railgun was the projectile itself,
which was a miracle of physical intuition, massive supercomputer
simulation, and Department of Agriculture food surplus woes. The
ultimate orbital weapon was a hardboiled egg with a big golden
end. Some say the technical wizard who fashioned the incantation
was a lab grunt who thirsted for his boss's Mil-spec secretary.
Others maintain it was an ex-fraternity initiation chairman.
Really neat defense research is done in expendable hell holes
like Nevada, because sometimes somebody slips a decimal point and
suddenly the hell hole is not there anymore. To confuse spies
and provide Mil-spec recreational facilities for the
administrators, all railgun research was concealed in Yellowstone
National Park, disguised as geysers. Who could have suspected?
Sheila Poswilly was a superlative nipple ring electroless plater
from San Francisco who answered her country's desperate call. She
figured she could set up her retirement in a couple of years by
slipping out a little of the yellow metal each day, and maybe
collecting intimate amusement information about her bosses which
would later prove to be of some small negotiable value. Nobody
could gold plate as perfectly as Sheila. Nobody could achieve
the sub-micron tolerances of uniformity and geometry essential to
America's defense, except for Sheila. Nobody ever told Sheila
that the eggs positively, absolutely had to be hardboiled before
launch, or else.
Or else, when the magic twanger is plucked a few thousand acres
of Yellowstone National Park erupt into a firestorm when the
fastest, and hottest, scrambled egg in the history of mankind
belches forth from the first full scale multi-gigajoule Star Wars
railgun. Don't you just hate it when things like that happen?